PVE1.1 - 2 IP addresses after PVE install (static + DHCP)

[vuser1]

Hello, I have 2 questions. I tried Proxmox and it looks like best OpenSource distrubution for virtualization. Latest KVM, OpenVZ and good management tools and it has STABLE and FAST KVM. I tried Ubuntu8.04, Fedora10 and Xen3.3 (under Ubuntu). Xen networking is only 50% of native, KVM gives up to 70-80%. I found fast KVM and stable management tools only in Proxmox. Fedora10 has good tools, but its KVM is slower in network bridging (60% of native). I decided to use Proxmox and like to do it in "suported way", if possible.

Yesterday I installed fresh Proxmox1.1 and added xorg + gnome desktop. I used static network option in PVE setup. ifconfig says there are 2 IP assigned to computer (BTW, /sbin was not in PATH, so I have to write /sbin/ifconfig):

vmbr0 has 192.168.1.5 - i gave this address to installer, it's correct.
eth0 has 192.168.1.103 - this has been isssued by DHCP server.

Is this normal? Looks like eth0 should not have IP address.

Question about that raid again - I like to have windows VM installed on mirrored softraid partition, is this installation supported? I tried installing windows directly on hard drive partition (just giving /dev/mapper/vg0-win as an image file in VM config file) and Proxmox works nice with it, even web UI. So I want to rely on Proxmox snapshots of OpenVZ VMs and leave them on default PVE partition, and run KVM VMs on mirrored partition instead of disk image. Looks like this will give me fastest HDD performance and reliability for windows VM. What is your recommendation? Is this supported way?

 

[martin]

Hello, I have 2 questions. I tried Proxmox and it looks like best OpenSource distrubution for virtualization. Latest KVM, OpenVZ and good management tools and it has STABLE and FAST KVM. I tried Ubuntu8.04, Fedora10 and Xen3.3 (under Ubuntu). Xen networking is only 50% of native, KVM gives up to 70-80%. I found fast KVM and stable management tools only in Proxmox. Fedora10 has good tools, but its KVM is slower in network bridging (60% of native). I decided to use Proxmox and like to do it in "suported way", if possible.

can you post your experiences here? This will help other to get an overview about Proxmox VE.

Yesterday I installed fresh Proxmox1.1 and added xorg + gnome desktop. I used static network option in PVE setup. ifconfig says there are 2 IP assigned to computer (BTW, /sbin was not in PATH, so I have to write /sbin/ifconfig):

vmbr0 has 192.168.1.5 - i gave this address to installer, it's correct.
eth0 has 192.168.1.103 - this has been isssued by DHCP server.

Is this normal? Looks like eth0 should not have IP address.

installing a desktop on top is not recommended, best is to have a small system. A Proxmox VE installation does not configure the network for DHCP, so there must something changed. You can install a standard Proxmox VE in Proxmox VE (as a KVM guest) to compare the network configurtations settings for a standard installation.

see /etc/network/interfaces:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address 192.168.7.105
        netmask 255.255.240.0
        gateway 192.168.2.1
        bridge_ports eth0
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_fd 0

Question about that raid again - I like to have windows VM installed on mirrored softraid partition, is this installation supported? I tried installing windows directly on hard drive partition (just giving /dev/mapper/vg0-win as an image file in VM config file) and Proxmox works nice with it, even web UI. So I want to rely on Proxmox snapshots of OpenVZ VMs and leave them on default PVE partition, and run KVM VMs on mirrored partition instead of disk image. Looks like this will give me fastest HDD performance and reliability for windows VM. What is your recommendation? Is this supported way?

Softraid is not supported due to many reasons, here is wiki page from a user describing some parts. http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Software_RAID

Currently we only support qcow2 file format for disk images. if you edit the VM config file directly, you can also use raw format and all other formats from qemu. If you use hard drive partition, you cannot migrate successfully from one host to another.

For windows, I just use IDE disks and qcow2 but I do not run highest load on these machines. (I assume raw could be a slightly faster)

For Proxmox VE 2.x we will introduce flexible storage pool, see roadmap.

Br, Proxmox Forum Admin

 

[vuser1]

I will definitely add my experiences to wiki/testimonials as soon as I installed the system properly. I faced problem with HDD performance. It suddenly became very low. I have 2 WD500AAKS drives. When formatted as ext3 and mounted in linux, I use Midnight Commander to watch read speed. I take 1-2GB file and copy it to /dev/null and speed is about 60-70Mb/sec.
-----------------------------
In KVM's Win2003 situation is strange:
Simple C:>copy bigfile nul command shows 50-60MB/sec, it's OK.
Tests like ZDBENCH (WinBench) shows same figures.
But visually I see that windows is slow. And it is really slow - any HDD operation in virtual windows loads host CPU up to 100-120% CPU (I have 2 cores, so maximum is 200% in top command). Same time, guest CPU load is low - no more than 20%.

FAR Commander (it is like Midnight Commander for win) shows speed 15-20MB/sec only!
------------------------------
Previously, disk speed in VM was 50-60MB/sec (in Unubtu, Fedora, Xen). I did not test hdd when tested PVE - I only tested bridge network speed. Problem appeared after I "finally" installed PVE. I installed Fedora back, install KMV windows and speed is slow - as it is in PVE. What a surprise!

I did tests on *.qcow disk images, on direct partitions, on softraid1, on softraid0 - same slow speed. Tried disk 1 and 2. Tried "Native IDE" and "AHCI" bios modes - doesn't matter.

I think there is something with I/O emulation because of drive speed in VM depends on the way (program) VM accesses the disk, and host CPU load is >100%. COPY command works fast while another programs work slow. I remember that I re-load BIOS settings before installing PVE. Also, to completely remove linux partiotions, I used windows installer to remove everything and create 1 big NTFS, then re-partitioned drives from PVE (pve is installed on 3rd drive).

Host:AMD X2-4400, Gigabite MA78G-DS3H (AMD780 chipset).
Giest:Win2003 32bit, it sees Intel bus-master controller, virtual HDD is in "Multi-word DMA2" mode. There is option "virtio" for disks in KVM, but no windows drivers for that.

Is there flag or something which remained after windows partitioner?
* How to completely remove all the information in HDD parttabe/mbr so it looks like "just from factory"?
* Is there some BIOS settings which influences KVM I/O emulation? (svm is already turned on, of course)
* How can I get same speed which I had before?

Any help is very appreciated. I just don't know what else should I do...